John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank, who helped Senator McCain draft his health Care proposals, is so out of touch that he should resign from the McCain campaign immediately. On the heels of a a US Census Bureau report that came out on Tuesday that showed a dip in the number of uninsured in the US for the first time during the Bush Administration, Mr. Goodman holds anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. His suggestion is insulting. That’s not the same and in terms of costs it places a burden on local city and state governments. It’s passing the buck, a shirk of Federal responsibility.

From the Dallas Morning News:

Texas once again led the nation with the highest percentage of residents without health insurance, a U.S. Census Bureau report showed Tuesday, although the same study also reports a slight dip last year in the percentage without coverage across the nation.

Almost one of every four Texas residents – 24.8 percent – were uninsured in 2006 and 2007, based on an average of the rates for those two years. That’s up from 23.9 percent for 2004 and 2005.

The national number also increased a bit for the two-year period to 15.5 percent. However, looking at 2007 by itself, the percentage of uninsured in the country fell from 15.8 percent in 2006 to 15.3 percent in 2007. (State percentages were given only for two-year periods.)

California still has the highest number – not percentage – of uninsured residents at 6.7 million, compared with 5.7 million Texans. The Texas number is up from 5.5 million in 2006.

McCain adviser John Goodman

But the numbers are misleading, said John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning Dallas-based think tank. Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain’s health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care.)

“So I have a solution. And it will cost not one thin dime,” Mr. Goodman said. “The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American – even illegal aliens – as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.

“So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved.”

Mr. Goodman’s analysis drew a sharp response from the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin-based think tank focusing on poverty issues. “That is not the same thing as having health insurance,” said Eva Deluna, a budget analyst for the center. People without insurance are less likely to seek care, and when they do, the cost to the health system is greater, she said.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.

As an addendum to my post of the Bhopal disaster, I would like to bring into the discussion the Risk Society theory that is, in my view, fundamental to the understanding of contemporary society in the global context.

What do the Bhopal industrial disaster, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown, the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the epidemics of mad cow disease, and the widespread use of genetically modified crops have in common? According to German sociologist Ulrich Beck, they all indicate the rise of a world risk society.

According to Beck (1992), the world risk society is a product of modernity. Since the industrial revolution, one of the major large-scale societal issues was the reduction of scarcity. The solution was to develop and use technology to produce enormous numbers of goods and increase the general level of wealth for the populations of industrial societies. This was successful: scarcity is hardly a problem in post-industrial societies (core areas). If anything, abundance is. Generally speaking, people no longer starve in developed countries, quite the contrary, obesity has become a problem.

However, this mass production of goods has been accompanied by the production of “bads” or, in other words, risks. Beck defines risk as “a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself. Risks, as opposed to older dangers, are consequences which relate to the threatening force of modernization and to its globalization of doubt" (1992: 21). As such, risks have several characteristics that distinguish them from dangers in previous periods of human history.

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The Aspen Institute, founded in 1950, is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering enlightened leadership and open-minded dialogue. President Clinton was the featured speaker at its annual Aspen Ideas Festival conference this past week. Here are some highlights of his comments:

Here is my profile of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf about whom President Clinton speaks in the above segment.

“It’s a simple little thing that philanthropists should be doing anywhere: Change the business model,” the former president said while discussing a market-based solution for distributing affordable HIV/AIDS drugs in the developing world. Clinton explained how, by changing the system of drug production and sales, his Clinton Foundation was able to cut their costs drastically while still allowing manufacturers to turn a profit.

He took a similar tack on addressing starvation in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions facing food shortages. Clinton said America needs to “get the show on the road” by aiding farmers and developing native agriculture in ailing nations, rather than simply dumping American foodstuffs on them.

“It’s crazy for us to keep using the old way of delivering food aid,” he said, explaining how Canada now devotes half of its outgoing aid to cash for farmers. Even the current suffering in Zimbabwe, he argued, could be alleviated by implementing a system that effectively tapped into its natural resources for food production. “This was a nation that could have been Africa’s bread basket,” he said.

I also agree with President Clinton’s comments from the second clip on how the nature of food chain is about to change dramatically. Local produce is the future. He is just super smart. A policy wonk. That’s not Barack Obama in the least.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.

Via IRIN, the news comes from Yemen,

“The Supreme Council for Motherhood and Childhood (SCMC), a government body, has drawn up a national action plan to end the practice of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in Yemen.

As a first step, the plan - the first of its kind in Yemen - aims to reduce FGM/C prevalence by 30 percent by 2012.

The plan has yet to be presented to Cabinet for approval, but was discussed at a workshop on 24 June, with the 65 participants representing UN agencies, the government, donors and civil society.

According to a new, unpublished, study on FGM/C presented at the workshop, FGM/C is practised in five of Yemen’s 21 governorates, with prevalence rates of 97.3 percent in al-Hudeidah Governorate; 97.3 percent in Hadhramaut; 96.5 percent in al-Mahrah; 82.2 percent in Aden; and 45.5 percent in Sanaa.”

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my topic choice, my snark!

Via the UK Guardian:

“Cuba has approved what is believed to be the world’s first registered lung cancer vaccine and is offering it to Cuban and foreign patients in its hospitals.

The therapeutic vaccine CimaVax EGF extends life with few side effects, and is another step in Cuba’s expertise in biotechnology. It was unveiled on Monday at Havana’s centre of molecular immunology.

It has been shown to boost survival rates by an average of four to five months, and in some cases much longer. It does not prevent lung cancer. Unlike chemotherapy, CimaVax EGF is said to have few side effects because it is a modified protein which attacks only cancer cells.

“It’s the first such vaccine registered in the world,” said Gisela González, who headed the project begun in 1992. The drug is in various clinical trials, some in Canada and Britain, and is expected to be approved next in Peru.

Several companies had been licensed to market the vaccine, but it will be made in Cuba, said González. It has been approved for trial in the United States but use there is at least two years away, she added.”

The cost of the treatment has not been set yet.

Cuba’s self-reliance is borne of Fidel Castro’s early admonishment that:

“The future of our homeland must be that of men of science.”

and of the necessity of brought on by a crippling US embargo that imperils the heatlh and well-being of ordinary Cubans has led to creation of one of the world’s most vibrant and socially progressive bio-technology sector. Unable to import some of the medicines it needed, Cuba began making its own generic drugs through reverse engineering. From there sprang a state pharmaceutical industry and later, a biotechnology offshoot. Cuba now produces over 80% of the types of drugs and medicines used by its 11 million people.

The Cuban healthcare strategy is rather straightforward. The government develops the drugs and vaccines according to the demands of Cubans. It then tests them and dispenses them across the population through a network of neighborhood family doctors, polyclinics, and hospitals. However, successful development does not always ensure an adequate supply.

Beginning in 1992, Cuba committed itself to investing 1.5% of GDP annually into scientific research. A total of $1 billion between 1992 and 1996 went toward creating a no-frills, centralized version of Silicon Valley, the Western Havana Scientific Pole. A remarkable investment for a country in the midst of an energy crisis, a food crisis (the average Cuban lost 20 lbs between 1992 and 1998), and a general economic collapse.

At the Western Havana Scientific Pole, scientists at 52 institutes are researching vaccines and therapies for AIDS and Alzheimer’s, among others. There are some cooperation agreements - for product sales, joint ventures, contract manufacture and research - with entities in Latin America, China, Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Australia. Cuba has over filed applications for 500 patents around the world. And while the US has granted Cuba 24 patents, the embargo has so far prevented Cuba from selling any of the products in the United States. Now it seems the embargo not just takes Cuban lives but American ones as well.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. The views expressed in this post are mine only.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts on reports - most of the time by IRIN - on the deplorable conditions under which women and girls live in many parts of the world. However, the articles have been piling up in my Newsreader, so, it’s time for one. So here we go:

First stop, Liberia with the always painful topic of fistula.

“Of 600 rape victims recently interviewed by a Liberian non-governmental organisation, 90 percent of the women were found to be suffering from fistulas – a vaginal tear which results in loss of bladder control and social stigmatisation.

Aid workers say the statistic, provided by the Women of Liberia Peace Network (WOLPNET) from surveys conducted in April 2008, shows the horrifying prevalence of rape and of a phenomenon which Liberian medical officials say they are ill-equipped to respond to.”

There are two types of fistulas that are prevalent in parts of Africa:

• Obstetric fistula, which is a vaginal tear resulting from prolonged obstructed labor. This form of fistulas is responsible for the appalling numbers of maternal death (deaths while in labor) in this area because of the increased risk of vaginal bleeding right after childbirth. And since a lot of women give birth at home, attended by a midwife, if they are lucky, they just bleed to death. Liberia has a particularly high rate of such deaths and this rate has been going up since the end of the war in 2003 as a result of the poor state of the health care system. With only 300 midwives when the country needs around 1,400, it is not surprising:

Maternal mortality has gone up by about 71 percent with 994 women dying for every 100,000 who give birth, compared to 580 out of every 100,000 women in the previous survey.”

The situation is so bad that the Liberian government has put in place different programs to recruit health workers and re-train the existing ones to include more obstetrics and gynecology in their skills as well as get health workers and midwives to emphasize family planning with their patients.

• The other type of fistula is “traumatic gynaecologic fistula that is a vaginal injury resulting from violent sexual assault or when objects are forcibly inserted into the vagina.” (Just typing that makes my skin crawl)

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

We all hate Big Pharma, don’t we? We hold pharmaceutical corporations responsible for a lot of ills: the high cost of medications, which drives up the cost of health care, their political influence and their capacity to block meaningful health care reform in the US.

We also blame them for the lack of affordable medications in the countries of the Global South, their resistance to the production of generic medications, through the enforcement of patents, from outside of the Western world. Heck, we even suspect them to use people in the Global South as guinea pigs while developing medications for “interesting” medical conditions such as “restless leg syndrome” in our countries.

We hate them and they know it. As a result, the largest pharmaceutical companies have developed mechanisms to respond concretely to pressures to be more responsive to concerns regarding access to health care and medications in the poorest countries, beyond mere charity. At least, that’s what they tell us. Can we trust them?

We don’t have to because there is a group doing the checking for us: Access to Medicine is a Dutch NGO that developed an index that measures how strongly pharmaceutical companies make an effort to provide access to health care in poor countries. The index has 8 criteria with sub-categories, each weighted differently, by importance:

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